Blue Ocean Strategy with Harvard Business Review Classic Articles “Blue Ocean Leadership” and “Red Ocean Traps” (3 Books)

Chart a path to creating uncontested market space and winning the future. This collection of work by globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne brings together their perennial bestseller book Blue Ocean Strategy with their classic articles “Blue Ocean Leadership” and “Red Ocean Traps.”

Blue Ocean Strategy, the global phenomenon that has sold 3.6 million copies and is recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), Kim and Mauborgne argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating “blue oceans”—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. The book presents a systematic approach to making competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans.

In the article “Blue Ocean Leadership,” the authors apply their concepts and tools to what is perhaps the greatest challenge of leadership: closing the gulf between the potential and realized talent and energy of employees. The authors offer a systematic method for uncovering, at every level of the organization, which leadership acts and activities will inspire employees to give it their all and a process for getting managers throughout the company to undertake these tasks.

In the article “Red Ocean Traps,” the authors show how managers’ mental models—ingrained assumptions and theories about the way the world works—undermine attempts to discover uncontested new market spaces. The authors provide a framework for avoiding spaces where competition is bloody (red oceans) and moving to blue ocean spaces with ample potential.